Space Rather than Seasonal Changes Explained More of the Spatiotemporal Variation of Tropical Soil Microbial Communities
Yaqing Wei, Fei Quan, Guoyu Lan, Zhixiang Wu, Chuan Yang
Abstract
The soil microbiomes communities of the two forests were not only affected by environmental factors (e.g., edaphic and climatic factors), but also by different dominant geographic factors. In particular, our work showed that spatial variation in bacterial and fungal community composition was mainly dominated by edaphic properties (e.g., pH) and climatic factors (e.g., MAT and MAP). Moreover, the environmental factors were mainly explained by geographic location effect rather than by seasonal effect, and environmental dissimilarity significantly increased with geographic distance. In conclusion, our study provides solid empirical evidence that space rather than season explained more of the spatiotemporal variation of soil microbial communities in the tropical forest.